Laura Levin, Diana Sánchez, Tamara Toledo, Luz Sierra, Dot Tuer, Helena Martin Franco, Camila Salcedo, Jorge Ayala-Isaza, Kevin Coleman, Patricio Davila, Alexandra Gelis, Claudia Arana, Anahí Gonzalez, Jose Andres Mora, Luisa Cruz, Derek Sands, Francisco-Fernando Granados, Gabriela Aceves Sepulveda, Zaira Zarza, Sarah Shamash, Bernardo Garcia, Luis Navarro Del Angel, Luisa Isidro Gerrera, Nicole Marchesseau, Johann Sander Puustusmaa, Pablo Rincon Diaz, and Creato.

At the centre of our expectations as organizers of this event is the possibility of offering multiple opportunities for dialogue. We desire to prompt conversations where participants can contribute their lived and creative experiences to a multivocal discussion, in the hopes that we reproduce models that are at odds with certain academic formats that give preference to public demonstrations of individual rigour and knowledgeability. Encounters imply proximity, which can shake the possibilities that an individual and a community might have thought of as available.

Not the outspoken axis of the Symposium’s discussions, but an underlying uncertainty that brings us together on this occasion, is the question of the idea of Latin American identity. When discussing Latin American arts in Canada, are we referring to the constellation of works produced by members of the Latin American diaspora, or to the products of creative and research processes taking place in, or looking at the region? How do we, as artists, critics, and scholars, by adhering to certain discursive and aesthetic codes, participate in the construction of a nostalgic portrayal of a territory and a culture? In what forms do we celebrate the nature of an “entangled surplus subjectivity, full of tugs, pressures, and pleasures”, over a sometimes-misleading notion of a well-rounded authenticity?

Another foregrounding element for this Symposium is that of our host territory. As some of us meet here in our condition as first or second-generation immigrants, we encounter the reality of standing on colonized land. The question of who is entitled to take the floor, when the ground’s original occupiers were displaced, or who might speak up, when an exercise of silencing has already taken place, is one not to underestimate. We wonder what forms of solidarity can take place among newcomers and the original custodians of so-called Canada, and what pieces of the histories brought through immigration can be weaved into local epistemologies.

Finally, we hope to speculate about the technologies and methodologies that are implemented in such processes of exchange. We expect to reflect on how film, media arts, performance, as well as curatorial and writing practices, not only reflect processes of migrant context-making, but how they participate in it, and in the threading of new networks of relationality.

Thank you to everyone who offered their guidance in the conceptualization of this gathering, and to the dedicated team of people who made it possible. To our guests and audience members, welcome to the first edition of this Symposium.

Nicole Cartier Barrera
Programming Director

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1) Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, John Wiley & Sons, 2009.

2) Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, 2003, XV.